Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Someone Else's Problems

Congrats! You got a job at a promising startup, now you are in a boat with all the good and bad things that come with it. There are no individual problems, there are just common problems with individual champions. A tech startup is a band of adventurers that decide to go on a treacherous journey. Unlike at a big company there is no redundancy in systems or personnel. There is always more work than time and the infrastructure is nascent. The phrase “this is someone else’s problem” doesn’t exist in this world.

Goals, people and systems change very rapidly, sometimes too fast to create a formal process. Andy Grove writes about this type of environment in “High Output Management”

When the environment changes more rapidly than one can change rules, or when a set of circumstances is so ambiguous and unclear that a contract between the parties that attempted to cover all possibilities would be prohibitively complicated, we need another mode of control, which is based on cultural values. Its most important characteristic is that the interest of the larger group to which an individual belongs takes precedence over the interest of the individual himself.

How do you deal with situations where you don’t agree with the way the team does things?
These situations come up when every new hire brings better systems, better practices and better ideas to the team.

Here are some ways to tackle problems without negatively affecting team unity:1.Champion the solution yourself: if the servers are running out of memory - volunteer to figure out how to deal with it yourself.2.Communicate with the team as a whole and with people individually: do you think that the current pull request process sucks? Propose a new one and then talk people through the benefits of what you are thinking.3.Don’t assume that you can change a group of people all at once, sometimes you need to steer the boat a little bit at time.

Here are some things no to do:1.Separate yourself from the group: you guys keep going right, I am going left!2.Give up quickly or get frustrated. I have rarely seen an organization change that took just one conversation. Organizational change requires a fair amount of evangelism.3.Refuse to adjust yourself.4.Start “us vs. them” camps.

Jeff Bezos talks about how to preserve team unity when there is no consensus:

Use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

Someone told me that most of the startups fail because of internal problems and not external ones. I don’t know if that’s 100% true, I can tell you that a lot of the startup engineering teams fail because they fail to reinforce the culture of stepping up, working through problems and communicating even when it hurts. Don’t make those mistakes.

Popular posts from this blog

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team.

I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me!

Silicon Valley is full of advice and it frequently comes from people who have little experience on the subject matter. A popular topic surrounds hiring and terminations with the king catch phrase being: “Hire Fast, Fire Fast.” To me, what that usually means is lack of diligence, thought, communication and courage.

When hiring people love going with their gut feel, often with disastrous results. There is an obvious subject of diversity of thought, appearance and background. When thinking “fast” you are probably hiring people like yourself because humans quickly react to people who they believe are in their tribe.

A startup that lacks the resources of a big company often becomes so desperate to get technical staff that when a decent candidate comes along, excitement ensues and the employer doesn't slow down to put them through a more rigorous hiring process.

I highly encourage technical founders and engineering executives to write out their precise hiring process. Of course, y…

Software development involves a great deal of collaboration. One of the most basic blocks of collaboration on a software development team is a code review. There have been many different ways of doing code reviews over time, some of this has been dictated by the tools available. Git and online source collaboration tools created a set of best practices that are worthwhile of adopting on any team.

About a month ago I have looked at various articles about how to best create a Pull Request (PR) and do a code review and the attached presentation is the result of this research. The presentation can help you guide your team and develop a set of collaboration practices that works for your particular situation.

It’s good to start out with why to seek a code review. Having clarity about your intentions helps you guide the person helping you with code reviews and also to manage your expectations about you can get out of the code review. The reasons for seeking a code review are generally …